Feb. 23-Mar. 2: Steven Mackey’s Red Wood Premiered as Part of The Soraya’s Treelogy – a Musical Portrait of California’s Trees

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 
Contact: Katy Salomon | Primo Artists | VP, Public Relations 
katy@primoartists.com | 212.837.8466 

 
GRAMMY-Winning Composer Steven Mackey’s
Red Wood Premiered as Part of The Soraya’s Treelogy Project – 
a Musical Portrait of California’s Trees 

Inspired by California’s Epic Wildfires, Treelogy is both a Celebration and 
a Call to Action to Save California’s Iconic Redwood, Sequoia, and Joshua Trees
Featuring Delirium Musicum and Commissioned by The Soraya at CSUN

February 23 – The Soraya Great Hall at The Valley Arts Center | Northridge, CA

February 26 – Hammer Theater Center | San Jose, CA

February 28 – Chico Performances | Chico, CA

March 2 –  Sonoma State University | Berkeley, CA

“Mackey's distinctive lexicon... says things we all know in our 
musical minds but have never heard articulated in this way.” – Blogcritics

www.stevenmackey.com

New York, NY (January 19, 2023) – GRAMMY-winning composer Steven Mackey’s Red Wood (2023) will premiere as part of The Soraya’s Treelogy project, performed by Delirium Musicum in a four-stop California tour this February. Red Wood consists of two, 11-minute halves, “Part 1 - Primeval…” and “Part 2 - Fairy Rings,” and will feature Mackey as electric guitar soloist. 

Inspired by California’s epic wildfires, as chronicled by The New York Times journalist John Branch, The Soraya’s Executive and Artistic Director Thor Steingraber, and artist in residence Etienne Gara, Treeology was created as a musical response to the fires, and a tribute to the state’s Iconic Redwood, Sequoia, and Joshua trees. Renowned composers Billy Childs, Steven Mackey, and Gabriella Smith — all with deep California roots of their own — have each composed original music for this three-part concert. Produced, commissioned, and presented by The Soraya, Treelogy will tour the state bringing together scientists, educators, activists, and advocates along with its inspiring message to campuses across California. 

Kicking off on Thursday, February 23, 2023 at 8:00pm, Treeology will premiere at The Soraya’s Great Hall in Northridge, California and then travel to the SJSU’s Hammer Theatre Center in San Jose on Sunday, February 26, 2023 at 7:30pm; Chico Performances on Tuesday, February 28, 2023 at 7.30pm; and at Sonoma State University’s Weill Hall in Berkeley, California on Thursday, March 2, 2023 at 7:30pm.

In his program note, Mackey attributes American writer John Steinbeck in describing the significance of the redwood tree in his North California hometown, “The redwoods, once seen, leave a mark or create a vision that stays with you always. No one has ever successfully painted or photographed a redwood tree. The feeling they produce is not transferable. From them comes silence and awe. It's not only their unbelievable stature, nor the color which seems to shift and vary under your eyes, no, they are not like any trees we know, they are ambassadors from another time. While it is true that the first reaction they elicit is ‘silence and awe,’ the seed in one’s psyche grows into something emotional and physical, which is when and where music begins for me.”

The title Red Wood is inspired by the reddish hue of the varnish on the wood of string instruments, as well as Mackey’s signature red electric guitar. The audience will be listening to music emanating from red wood. The piece takes a comprehensive view of “wood” as central to our lives, with lamentable consequences from climate change.

Program Information
Thursday, February 23, 2023 at 8:00pm
The Valley Arts Center Presents Treelogy
The Soraya’s Great Hall | Northridge, CA
Link: https://www.thesoraya.org/calendar/details/treelogy-2023 

Sunday, February 26, 2023 at 7:30pm
Hammer Theatre Presents Treelogy
Hammer Theatre Center | San Jose, CA 
Link: https://hammertheatre.com/events-list/ 

Tuesday, February 28, 2023 at 7:30pm
Chico Performances Presents Treelogy
Laxson Auditorium | Chico, CA
Link: www.chicoperformances.com/artists/2022-2023/treelogy.php 

Thursday, March 2, 2023 at 7:30pm
Sonoma State University Presents Treelogy
Weill Hall | Berkeley, CA
Link: https://gmc.sonoma.edu/treelogy/ 

About Steven Mackey
“My entire life was changed by a single note.” As a teenager growing up in Northern California obsessed with blues-rock guitar, Steven Mackey was in search of the “right wrong notes,” as he often likes to say, referencing Thelonius Monk. The single note in question occurs in the second movement of Beethoven’s last string quartet, which a 19-year-old Mackey heard while driving around northern California: an unexpected unison E-flat that wielded the power to explode assumptions he had about classical music. He would later describe it as the most psychedelic rock music he’d ever heard.

Mackey cites this as the moment he decided to become a composer, and it set the young guitarist on a path that has defined his music to this day: Colorful notes (including blue) creating vivid topographies that serve as landmarks on fantastical journeys.

Today, Steven Mackey is a GRAMMY-winning composer of works for chamber ensemble, orchestra, dance, and opera – commissioned by the greatest orchestras around the world, and winner of several awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Kennedy Center Friedheim Award. Bright in coloring, ecstatic in inventiveness, lively and profound, Mackey’s music spins the tendrils of his improvisatory riffs into large-scale works of grooving, dramatic coherence.

Mackey began composition studies at the University of California at Davis and received his PhD at Brandeis University. Upon graduating and becoming a professor at Princeton, Mackey came to realize his true creative voice by merging his academic training with the free-spirited physicality of his mother-tongue rock guitar music. Signature pieces incorporating rock vernacular into traditional classical ensembles emerged: Troubadour Songs (1991) for string quartet and electric guitar; Physical Property (1992) for electric guitar and string quartet; and Banana/Dump Truck (1995), a concerto for solo electrified cello plus a ripieno group of cellists and orchestra.

The decades that followed saw Mackey create many of the defining pieces in his repertoire: Dreamhouse (2003) for solo tenor, vocal quartet, electric guitar quartet and orchestra, nominated for four GRAMMY awards; A Beautiful Passing (2008) for violin and orchestra, an emotional reflection upon the death of his mother that Leila Josefowicz premiered with the BBC Philharmonic; and Slide (2011), an experimental music theater piece that won a GRAMMY Award for a recording featuring Mackey on electric guitar alongside vocalist Rinde Eckert and eighth blackbird. In 2021, the LA Phil, Gustavo Dudamel, and trumpet soloist Thomas Hooten gave the world premiere of Shivaree, a fantasy for trumpet and orchestra. Mackey further expanded his theatrical catalog with his short chamber opera Moon Tea about the 1969 meeting between the Apollo 11 astronauts and the Royal Family, premiered by Opera Theatre of Saint Louis in 2021, as well as with his 2022 music theater work Memoir, based on the pages of his late mother’s memoirs.

This season sees three world premieres: Concerto for Curved Space with the Boston Orchestra and Andris Nelsons; Red Wood, a new environmentally concerned work for The Soraya’s Treelogy Project; and RIOT with mezzo-soprano Alicia Olatuja, Mackey on electric guitar, New Jersey Symphony, Princeton University Glee Club, and conductor Xian Zhang.

Today, Mackey lives in Princeton, New Jersey with his wife, composer Sarah Kirkland Snider, and their son Jasper and daughter Dylan, and teaches at Princeton University, where he mentors young composers as director of the Edward T. Cone Composition Institute. In fall 2022, Mackey also joins the composition faculty at the Curtis Institute of Music. He continues to explore an ever-widening world of timbres befitting a complex, 21st-century culture, while always striving to make music that unites the head and heart, that is visceral, that gets us moving. Learn more at www.stevenmackey.com. 

About the Younes and Soraya Nazarian Center for the Performing Arts (The Soraya)
Located on the vibrant and diverse campus of California State University in the heart of Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley, the Younes and Soraya Nazarian Center for the Performing Arts (The Soraya) continues its vigorous commitment to innovating, exceling, and amplifying access by offering a wide variety of performances that reflect LA’s many distinctive communities and featuring new and original work from the Los Angeles region as well as artists from around the world. Learn more at www.thesoraya.org. 

Photo Credit: Kah Poon

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